Currents

In response to a call from President Bush to start weaning America from its petroleum addiction and reducing Middle East oil imports as much as 75 percent by 2025, the federal government has finally implemented a long-awaited bump in gas mileage standards for light trucks such as sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and pickups. Under existing standards, automakers’ 2006 model year light trucks must meet an average of 21.6 miles per gallon (mpg). The new rules call for bumping the fuel economy standard up to 22.2 mpg.

In a strange turn of events, Republicans from the U.S. House of Representatives last week put the kybosh on the most recent attempt to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, despite bi-partisan support from the Senate to include such a proposal in the final version of the 2007 federal budget bill. Environmentalists are hopeful that this latest in a long string of Congressional rejections of ANWR drilling will be the last time they must go on the defensive over the issue while pro-drilling President Bush is in office.

Last week a national panel of scientists commissioned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended lowering the existing federal standard for safe amounts of fluoride in drinking water supplies. The panel, consisting of 12 experts from the National Academies’ National Research Council, cited research showing that children exposed to levels at or near the current standard of a maximum of four milligrams per liter of water can suffer severe tooth enamel damage, while adults with a sustained intake of that much fluoride can be prone to weak bones more susceptible to fracturing.

An international team of researchers using advanced computer models is predicting that at the current rate of development, as much as 40 percent of the Amazon forest as we know it today will be gone by 2050. Britaldo Soares-Filho and his team based at Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais reported in the journal Nature that without more protections, more than 770,000 square miles of rainforest would be lost, with at least 100 native species losing more than half of their habitat.

Two thousand and six is emerging as the year Americans finally wake up to the reality of global warming. Of course, E has been hammering away at the issue for six years or more, but now it has momentum, with the release of several new books and a Time magazine cover story ("Be Worried, Be Very Worried") April 3.

United Nations officials convened a two-day emergency summit in Paris last week to discuss the feasibility of listing five of the international agency’s World Heritage Sites as endangered due to global warming. Environmentalists blame melting glaciers on Mt. Everest and dying coral at the Great Barrier Reef on global warming, and are calling on the UN to institute special protections for such places.

Quick on the heels of Gail Norton’s resignation, President Bush last week announced that conservative Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne would take over as head of the Interior Department. Bush praised the outgoing Norton as "a strong advocate for the wise use and protection of our nation’s natural resources."

Laurie David had a long and interesting career in the entertainment business, serving as David Letterman’s talent coordinator and forming her own management company that handled many top comedians and comedy writers.

With the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee set to take up revisions to the Endangered Species Act, nearly 6,000 of the country’s most influential biologists, including six National Medal of Science recipients, signed onto a letter last week urging lawmakers to preserve those protections based on sound science. Many of the scientists who signed onto the letter, prepared by the Union of Concerned Scientists, are fearful that an extreme revision of the law as passed by the House last year could jeopardize the long-term viability of many of the species now protected by the landmark 1973 law.

The worst spill in the history of oil development on Alaska’s North Slope last week shut down one of five petroleum-processing centers in the region while clean-up crews hurried to mitigate environmental damage. State officials estimate that as many as 260,000 gallons of crude from a leaking transit pipeline in an oil field jointly owned by ExxonMobil, BP and ConocoPhillips covered about two acres of frozen tundra near Prudhoe Bay. They expect the clean-up to take a couple of weeks, at which point operators will be able to re-open their processing center and restore production to pre-spill levels.